Though I cannot discover an adequate reason why, I feel much more comfortable sleeping in places that are not my own bed. Right now, I find myself on the couch and perfectly comfortable to sleep. Yet, as soon as I get in my bed, I toss and turn and roll around. I have no reasonable explanation and I find it very interesting.
Only five more days until my LSAT scores arrive. It is odd how much importance we place on test results, numbers that dictate the "intelligence" of an individual. There are plenty of other ways one could be deemed smart. How they interact socially, for example. I know many people who could convince the devil to sell his soul, yet they don't have the capability to sit down and take tests. This bothers me very much. We allow this standardized set of numbers and scaling dictate who is good enough for a particular school, etc.
Perhaps it is just coincidence or my naivety, but it seems as though very few people who become superstars or game-changers fared well under the conventional norms of academia. A recurring pattern? Does success only typically become a viable option to those who work outside the box?Surely there is some sort of connection. I think in some way, it is a necessary precaution that the academic system and the societal regulations that come with it do their best not to promote stardom. That is, it comes across as a sort of brainwashing where they instill ideas in each student about their aptitude and what they'd be good at someday. Are they even qualified to say what another individual would be good at? Even today, there is so much we don't know about one another. It kind of makes me a little bit sad. Que sera, sera.
Ps I just woke up on my couch after dozing off the last half hour. This is exactly what I was talking about before!
TC
There definitely needs to be a revolution in the way we test people on things. I'd disagree with what seems to me like an underlying idea you have that the MATERIAL we're being taught isn't as useful (I might be wrong in ascribing that idea to you), because I think the more knowledge we have the better we can make judgments about things... but surely rote memorization and regurgitation are not the best ways to go about instilling this knowledge into students, especially since many (such as myself) master the cram-and-ace method that gets us A's in our classes but leaves us without any retention of the information a mere few months later.
ReplyDeleteJames!
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't until I exported my blog today to xml and read the source code that your name struck my eye and wondered why it was in my source code, only for me to discover that you'd commented. So sorry for not replying. I couldn't agree more about the memorization and whatnot. I suppose the point I was trying to make is that the self-motivated can indeed become just as knowledgable without the formal institution of college through the limitless resources of books and the Internet. Yes, college is a necessary evil, but some of the greatest minds in the history of humanity were without formal college education.